Becoming a better artist - Part 3 of 3

Written by: Johannes L

In this part, let's get to the bottom of what really is the final solution to becoming a better artist, according to myself that is.

Ask the right questions

As mentioned in the first part, we’re getting lots of questions about our work, how we do this and how we do that. What used to strike me the most, and sometimes still do, is that the two absolutely, doubtlessly most frequently asked questions we got were:

1. What render settings did you use?
2. What camera settings did you use?

I'm sure that these days, most artists already know exactly where I'm going with this and why these questions bother me.

?

1. Render settings

Actually, we can use the camera & lens story I wrote earlier here too.

You can replace “camera” with “render settings”, and “lens” with “scene contents” ?(models, materials, textures, etc). No matter what render settings you use, if your scene contents are bad, your image will be bad.

The same goes the other way around, if you have really high-quality models and materials, the image will probably look pretty good no matter what render settings you have.

Render settings are not important enough that this would be the first thing coming to your mind when asking a question. If the image looks bad, no tweaking of render settings in the world will ever save it.?The settings are not what makes your image.

Visual story-telling does.

2. Camera settings

As 3D visualizers, we are literally virtual photographers. That means that we must know how a camera works to be able to know how to use our render engine properly.

If you have the slightest idea of how a camera works, you also know that no camera settings work the same in two scenarios, meaning that asking someone about their camera settings is just… pointless. Just as in real life, all scenes are unique and with different light temperatures, intensities, etc, they need different settings. If you don’t know this, you better get yourself a camera and start shooting.

Here's an opinion that I strongly have, that I'm sure will be stepping on someone's toes:

A 3D artist that isn't also a photographer or knows how photography works, is simply no 3D artist.

One of all times I got this question, I replied something like “The trick is to use F-Stop 100, shutter speed 0,01, ISO 9000, and pink color in white balance”. The guy in question responded with his eternal gratefulness for my help. I never heard from him again, but I bet he never realized he got trolled.

So stop asking irrelevant questions, as those will never make you a better artist. Once in a while, it's worth stepping back and giving extra thought to what we spend our time and energy on. Make sure it's not the things that won't help you on your journey.

Don't underestimate our subconscious mind

Our brains have this extraordinary ability to notice details. We may not see them, but we perceive them. It can be the dust on the light bulb, the crumbs on the worktop, or the clamped cable on the wall going down behind the door. It’s definitely the nagged edges on the table, the fingerprints on the glass, and the hardly visible coffee stain on the countertop.

Don’t neglect the smallest details just because you don’t think anyone will notice them. But also make sure not to exaggerate them only because you really want people to notice that you spent time on them. They are not always supposed to be seen, only perceived.

Here's the final solution to becoming a better artist!

Have you ever bought a 3D model online, only to realize when you pick its material, that it's made up of an insane hierarchy of material nodes so complicated you can't figure out how it works? And as you want to tweak it, it's easier to just throw it away and redo it from scratch? And you realized that in 99,9% of the cases, you get a far better result by using only a small fraction of the nodes that it had from the beginning?

Then welcome to a 3D artists world. There's a pandemic in the CGI Industry of over-complicating things. And material setups are great examples; we start making a material by adding a bunch of nodes. Then it doesn't look the way they want, so we add more nodes to correct whatever issues we are having. Then it still doesn't look right so we add even more nodes, only without realizing that the new nodes we added are actually just there to correct for what the other nodes in the tree were doing wrong in the first place.

This happens all the time, everywhere. We start with shit, and by trying to fix it, we add even more layers of shit. Doesn't make any sense, does it?

If there's something we as artists really should try to learn, and always have in the back of our minds, is to keep things simple. This is, according to me, the biggest key to becoming a better artist. And after 20 years of doing 3D, this is still something I'm struggling with.

I've spent a lot of time making tutorials for my Patreon page and sometimes people write to me that I make things look so simple, when in fact they are not. Well, you're wrong. Because they are simple. How? Because I keep it simple. But that's where the experience mentioned earlier comes into play. The hardest thing, that requires the most experience, is to keep things simple.

Ask any industrial designer this question and they will agree. Ask IKEA's "flat-pack" packaging designers, and they will agree. It takes a lot of effort figuring out how to flat-pack a table to take the absolute least possible amount of space.

And as 3D artists, we need to think and work in a similar fashion.

Here's an example of a, still fairly simple node tree you could find on a bought model (often it's way worse than this):

Which, in many cases, could be replaced by this, and still look better:

Instead of adding a bunch of nodes, we could for example use the output curves to adjust the effect of our texture maps. This mindset doesn't only apply to materials though but to everything in our scene and our thought process. We need to keep things as simple as they can be. If we keep it simple, it looks simple because it is simple. Simple, right?

But it's hard to keep it simple.

What's reeeaaally easy though, is to complicate things. And it's when you complicate things that you're losing control, and that's when it's easy to get stuck in a bad circle of trying to fix things that got complicated, by complicating it even more.

Sometimes, the best tactic when your images don't look the way you want or when you feel that you start losing control is to delete everything and start over. Not happy with the lighting? Reset the render engine and set it all up from scratch. Not happy with your material? Delete it and start over.

Don't try to fix your material by adding more layers of fixes. Don't try to fix your lighting by adding more lights.

Stop walking in your heroes’ footsteps

Coming back to the story about the corona dude asking about how to make Bertrand’s images, this is really where I want to get my point across.?

Like many others, I always had Bertrand Benoit as a personal role model. I used to study his work, read all blog posts, scavenging every source I could find in my search for his “magic trick”. I tried to replicate his work, I bought his scenes in the belief that I would be able to reverse engineer them. Of course, time after time I failed. I never reached his quality and I never stopped being fascinated by the “magic trick” he was using.

So one day I got tired of it. I was too exhausted to keep trying to beat him and I simply realized that whatever I was doing wasn’t working and I’ll never get better. So I decided not to chase it anymore, to just unwillingly settle where I was and keep producing crappy 3D like a machine. Simply, I gave up on myself and my development.

And that, my friends, was where it all changed. I suddenly noticed that my personal development sky-rocketed. Instead of doing what somebody else was doing, I started doing things based on my own curiosity and needs. I tried new renderers and techniques not because my heroes used them, but because I simply felt like doing so. I was forced to analyze my own problems and eventually found my own solutions. And the workflow I found to be working for me, turned out to be very different from what my heroes use.?

That made me realize that we are all unique people with our own way of thinking and working, and we all need our own workflows, tools, and ideas.

Here's something to think about:

There's a reason why you can look at a Picasso piece and instantly know it's Picasso.

There's a reason why you can look at an Andy Warhol piece and instantly know it's Andy Warhol.

There's a reason why you can look at a Beeple piece and instantly know it's Beeple.

There's a reason why you can look at a Bertrand Benoit piece and instantly know it's Bertrand Benoit.

Because artistry and creativity come from within. It's your personality, visualized. Art is your brain's inner voice, translated into a visual language everyone can understand.

That's why we can't do what others do and expect the same results. Because we're not them. Our brain doesn't speak the exact same language as theirs do.

This is the reason why I left my employment at IKEA, and it’s why I’ve turned down job offers from high-profile companies with salaries I could only dream of a few years earlier. It’s why the only reasonable thing for me was to work for myself, to be self-employed. Because when working for others,?I would be forced to work with their tools, in their workflow, with their management and routines, and that simply doesn’t fit me.?

As the old saying goes, “there are as many painting techniques as there are painters”, and this applies very well to our industry as well.

I’m not saying that you shouldn’t follow your role models and that shouldn’t read blogs etc, you definitely should. But you should follow them for inspiration, and not for trying to do everything the exact same way as they are doing it.

Simply stop trying so hard to become someone else, and instead start becoming a better version of yourself and your own artist.

Thank you for reading!

Yours truly,

Jo